LLMMedium
Purportedly Taxpayer-Funded Deloitte Report for Australian Government Contains Alleged AI-Generated Citations and Fabricated Legal Quote
- Occurred
- Aug 22, 2025
- Published
- Oct 7, 2025
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
Australian academics reportedly identified fabricated references and a misattributed legal quote in a $439,000 Deloitte report for the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations on welfare compliance. Deleted citations allegedly referred to non-existent works, and a Federal Court judgment was misstated. Deloitte later acknowledged limited use of generative AI in preparing the report and issued a corrected version with a partial refund.
Developers
- Large language model developers
Deployers
- Deloitte
Harmed parties
- Scholars erroneously cited
- Lisa Burton Crawford
- Janina Boughey
- Government of Australia
- General public of Australia
- Epistemic integrity
- Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR)
- Carolyn Adams
- Academics
- Deloitte
Tags
- response
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 85%
Rationale: Generative AI hallucinations led to fabricated citations in a government report, causing reputational and financial harm.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8